Featured Research

from universities, journals, and other organizations

Black hole blows big bubble

Date:

July 8, 2010

Source:

European Southern Observatory

Summary:

Combining observations made with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope, astronomers have uncovered the most powerful pair of jets ever seen from a stellar black hole. This object, also known as a microquasar, blows a huge bubble of hot gas, 1000 light-years across, twice as large and tens of times more powerful than other known microquasars.

Share This

Combining observations done with ESO's Very Large Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope, astronomers have uncovered the most powerful pair of jets ever seen from a stellar black hole. The black hole blows a huge bubble of hot gas, 1,000 light-years across or twice as large and tens of times more powerful than the other such microquasars. The stellar black hole belongs to a binary system as pictured in this artist's impression.

Credit: ESO/L. Calηada

Combining observations made with ESO's Very Large Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope, astronomers have uncovered the most powerful pair of jets ever seen from a stellar black hole. This object, also known as a microquasar, blows a huge bubble of hot gas, 1000 light-years across, twice as large and tens of times more powerful than other known microquasars.

Related Articles

"We have been astonished by how much energy is injected into the gas by the black hole," says lead author Manfred Pakull. "This black hole is just a few solar masses, but is a real miniature version of the most powerful quasars and radio galaxies, which contain black holes with masses of a few million times that of the Sun."

Black holes are known to release a prodigious amount of energy when they swallow matter. It was thought that most of the energy came out in the form of radiation, predominantly X-rays. However, the new findings show that some black holes can release at least as much energy, and perhaps much more, in the form of collimated jets of fast moving particles. The fast jets slam into the surrounding interstellar gas, heating it and triggering an expansion. The inflating bubble contains a mixture of hot gas and ultra-fast particles at different temperatures. Observations in several energy bands (optical, radio, X-rays) help astronomers calculate the total rate at which the black hole is heating its surroundings.

The astronomers could observe the spots where the jets smash into the interstellar gas located around the black hole, and reveal that the bubble of hot gas is inflating at a speed of almost one million kilometres per hour.

"The length of the jets in NGC 7793 is amazing, compared to the size of the black hole from which they are launched," says co-author Robert Soria [1]. "If the black hole were shrunk to the size of a soccer ball, each jet would extend from the Earth to beyond the orbit of Pluto."

This research will help astronomers understand the similarity between small black holes formed from exploded stars and the supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies. Very powerful jets have been seen from supermassive black holes, but are thought to be less frequent in the smaller microquasar variety. The new discovery suggests that many of them may simply have gone unnoticed so far.

The gas-blowing black hole is located 12 million light-years away, in the outskirts of the spiral galaxy NGC 7793 (eso0914b). From the size and expansion velocity of the bubble the astronomers have found that the jet activity must have been ongoing for at least 200 000 years.

Note

[1] Astronomers do not have yet any means of measuring the size of the black hole itself. The smallest stellar black hole discovered so far has a radius of about 15 km. An average stellar black hole of about 10 solar masses has a radius of about 30 km, while a "big" stellar black hole may have a radius of up to 300 km. This is still much smaller than the jets, which extend out to several hundreds light years on each side of the black hole, or about several thousand million million km!

More information

This result appears in a paper published in this week's issue of the journal Nature (A 300 parsec long jet-inflated bubble around a powerful microquasar in the galaxy NGC 7793, by Manfred W. Pakull, Roberto Soria and Christian Motch).

More From ScienceDaily

More Space & Time News

Featured Research

Mar. 31, 2015  Designed to detect the fossil radiation of the Universe, the Planck satellite, working in tandem with Herschel, can also help to understand the macrostructure of the Universe. A just-published ... full story

Mar. 31, 2015  Astronomers have conducted observations of the massive-star forming region IRAS 16547-4247. The observation results shows the presence of multiple, or at least two, gas outflows from a protostar, ... full story

Mar. 30, 2015  Stars form when gravity pulls together material within giant clouds of gas and dust. But gravity isn't the only force at work. Both turbulence and magnetic fields battle gravity, either by stirring ... full story

Mar. 30, 2015  Scientists have long puzzled over the planet Mercury's excessively dark surface. New research suggests that carbon from passing comets could be the planet's mystery darkening ... full story

Mar. 30, 2015  Luke Skywalker's home in "Star Wars" is the desert planet Tatooine, with twin sunsets because it orbits two stars. So far, only uninhabitable gas-giant planets have been identified circling such ... full story

Mar. 26, 2015  Astronomers have studied how dark matter in clusters of galaxies behaves when the clusters collide. The results show that dark matter interacts with itself even less than previously thought, and ... full story

Mar. 26, 2015  The best observations so far of the dusty gas cloud G2 confirm that it made its closest approach to the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way in May 2014 and has survived the ... full story

Mar. 25, 2015  Researchers have completed a new analysis of an ancient Martian lake system in Jezero Crater, near the planet's equator. The study finds that the onslaught of water that filled the crater was one of ... full story

Mar. 25, 2015  The precise measurement of Saturn's rotation has presented a great challenge to scientists, as different parts of this sweltering ball of hydrogen and helium rotate at different speeds whereas its ... full story

Related Stories

Feb. 28, 2014  Astronomers have been studying nearby galaxy M83 and have found a new superpowered small black hole, named MQ1, the first object of its kind to be studied in this much detail. Astronomers have found ... full story

Feb. 21, 2012  Astronomers have clocked the fastest wind yet discovered blowing off a disk around a stellar-mass black hole. This result has important implications for understanding how this type of black hole ... full story

July 27, 2011  The flow of hot gas toward a black hole has been clearly imaged for the first time in X-rays. The observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory will help tackle two of the most fundamental ... full story

Apr. 7, 2011  Astronomers are studying one of the most puzzling cosmic blasts yet observed. More than a week later, high-energy radiation continues to brighten and fade from its location. Astronomers say that the ... full story

Nov. 24, 2010  Following a study of what is in effect a miniature galaxy buried inside a normal-sized one -- like a Russian doll -- astronomers have concluded that massive black holes are more powerful than we ... full story

ScienceDaily features breaking news and videos about the latest discoveries in health, technology, the environment, and more -- from major news services and leading universities, scientific journals, and research organizations.